A 40 KB PPO agent runs on each device's NPU, jointly optimizing 8 features — signal, battery, trust, bandwidth, latency, mobility, congestion, sybil risk.
vs. OLSR / AODV / BATMAN
Classical MANET protocols optimize one metric. AETHER jointly optimizes 8 features and adapts to context.
vs. SDN
SDN needs a central brain. AETHER's policy is learned globally, executed locally — no controller, no SPOF.
Federated learning
Nodes share gradient updates (not data) over a privacy-preserving aggregation channel. The mesh gets smarter every hour.
function selectNextHop(packet, neighbors):
candidates = []
for n in neighbors:
score = w1*signalQuality(n)
+ w2*batteryHeadroom(n)
+ w3*trustScore(n)
+ w4*bandwidthAvailable(n)
+ w5*(1/predictedLatency(n))
+ w6*mobilityAlignment(n, packet.dst)
- w7*congestion(n)
- w8*sybilRisk(n)
candidates.push({n, score})
// Multi-path: forward via top-K with probability ∝ softmax(score)
return weightedSample(candidates, K=2)
// Weights w1..w8 adapted online by on-device PPO agent (8-dim state, 64-unit MLP).